[liz_upton]

Hi - I'm Liz from Raspberry Pi. What you can see in that vid isn't the whole of Inglorious Basterds, but just the trailer (which is why it fits on a small SD card) - we were playing it on a loop. The Raspberry Pi can play back full 25 megabit HDMI; it's part of our mobile phone SoC dividend.

[wisty]

By mobile phone SoC dividend, that's the VideoCore discrete signal processor, right?

From what I can gather Pi has a BCM2763 (as a DSP co-processor to the an ARM, or standalone?) or BCM2835 (combining a DSP and ARM on one chip) ... wikipedia is a bit hazy. (edit: it's the BCM2835 DSP + ARM on a chip, according to the rasberrypi FAQ).

It's got hardware that's dedicated to doing things it's 700MHz ARM chip simply can't, like watching YouTube in fullscreen (obligatory http://xkcd.com/619/). It should be able to do anything a high-end mobile phone can do (except take calls), which is what most people want.

It might be a good deal cooler with a $2 wifi chip (though that might make it harder to manufacture), or a $10 wifi USB adaptor, but I guess you have to draw the line somewhere.

[liz_upton]

It's a cine clip, so I think it was 24fps. We can decode 30fps, but it's actually quite hard to find content!

[Jabbles]

Do you have a reference for the technical details of this? Do you know how much power it draws? Are details like MTTF known? Where did you get the H264 decoder from?

Exciting stuff.

[nitrogen]

I'd be glad to generate some 30fps HD content (nothing fancy, just some CGI loops that will show the smoothness of video playback) in exchange for the ability to purchase the higher-end version sooner.

[Jabbles]

Well in that case I'm even more impressed. It's a pity the article doesn't mention that. What's the frame rate?

[Kavan]

Congrats Liz, great little piece of kit!

Think we are seeing the start of a new uber cheap PC market. Almost zero cost. It will make a big difference in the developing world and I think will be a huge hit (at least amongst the tech geeks) in developed nations.

PS +1 on the comment for wifi in v2

[samstave]

I REALLY want one of these now - how much to get a unit NOW rather than waiting till you hit the $25 price point?

[ralph]

It's not a question of money. They are a UK charity and their 50 alpha boards are out amongst those who can provide the most benefit to the project.

Get in line behind the rest of us. :-)

[pbhjpbhj]

They're on an alpha unit at the moment IIRC. I'd expect it to cost a lot and to slow down final production for them to start trying to sell at this stage.

[zokier]

Just to nitpick: HDMI is approx 10Gbit/s interface. If you are talking about decoding capabilities, then H.264 profile/level would be more useful metric, ie H.264 High Profile, Level 4 (which I think is what Blu-ray video usually is, or at least close to it).

It's a hardware decoder, right? So it's decoding capabilities are not really representative of it's general performance?